The Winners and Losers in Iran (So Far)

Welcome back everybody to What Really Matters. I'm Jeremy Stern with you in Los Angeles.

I'm here as always with Walter Russell Meade of Tablet, the Wall Street Journal,

Hudson Institute, and the Hamilton School at the University of Florida.

We're going to talk a lot about the unfolding operation in Iran in the big conversation today,

but first let's start with this week's news items, all of which are tied to the larger Iran story,

but we'll borrow from some of its interesting component parts first, so first story of the week.

A week long clash between Anthropic and the Pentagon came to a head this week when CEO Dario Amade

refused to lose in safety guardrails, preventing clods used for mass domestic surveillance or

fully autonomous weapons. As a result, President Trump ordered every federal agency to immediately

seize using Anthropics technology and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated the company

a, quote, supply chain risk, a designation typically reserved for U.S. adversaries,

effectively forcing military contractors to avoid Anthropic as well with a six-month phase-out

of its military applications. Within hours Anthropics Chief Rival Open AI announced its own

Pentagon deal to deploy its models and classified systems. The dispute has since grown messier.

Amade sent an internal memo calling Trump's attitude toward Anthropic a demand for, quote,

dictator-style praise in dismissing Open AI's Pentagon arrangement as safety theater,

which in administration officials said threatened any path to reconciliation.

As of today, Thursday, March 5th, however, Amade has resumed discussions with the Pentagon.

Claude Crucially is the AI model powering Maven, the data and intelligence system that is behind

the current U.S. campaign in Iran. Walter, is this episode news or phone news?

Well, first let's just note that if you had read those paragraphs out five years ago,

no one on the planet would have had any idea what you were talking about.

Any part of it. I mean, we are in a brave new world and we're having fights about things that

didn't exist a very few years ago. I think it is news. I mean, I'm glad that they're still talking

because I think that the answer is to figure out some way for the Defense Department,

excuse me, the Department of War, to be able to use critical technologies that might save our

servicemen's lives when we are actually fighting. Let me just say that I for one would approve

of that course of action. The deeper issue here is this kind of the way that information

and the processing of information is it has become linked to the strength, security,

and even existence of the state. In that sense, you know, for over 300 years, money has been

been the banking system. I've been not necessarily part of the state, but have had a very close

relationship with it and central banks, which buy and sell government debt, which do all kinds of

things that keep the financial system going. You know, they are, they're independent. At least

most of them are independent of the state. Some in former times, they were actually often private

companies, but the government, the state wouldn't have the power to fight war or to pay its bills

if it didn't exist. And so money is both something that ordinary people use in their lives

and something that is essential is almost a constitutive element of government.

Well, we're getting to the point where all information is going to be like that.

And so information companies are already beginning to have sort of the same kind of

importance to government that banks and the financial system have long done. We may, who knows,

in some years, we may be talking about the info system or something of that kind.

And, you know, who knows, the central info system, the central info bag or whatever we call it.

By the way, I would love to really like get some, you know, angel investment capital or whatever

company that turned into. But, and this is going to cause immense problems up and down the line.

And this one of gosh, you're going to use our poor innocent lovey w software to kill people overseas.

All right, that's, you know, but also that information capability, if you have enough

information to defend your country from the bad guys overseas, you also have the information

capability to monitor and surveil everybody in the United States. And so does that mean that we're

going to be, you know, that our choices to either just get conferred by China and let the Chinese

government have control over the, you know, total control over everybody's information. But we

actually have to build our own monstrous despotism to hold them off. Hopefully not, let me say,

we will need an info system that is as strong and capable as anything that an authoritarian

government can produce. But somehow we do need guardrails. We do need ways to protect

our democracy. This is not a new problem for us in the sense that if the government has,

has enough force to repel foreign invaders, it also has enough force to quell domestic rebels.

So technically, this is not, it's neither an insoluble problem or a completely new one.

But it is a really thorny, intricate, complicated one. I would say that right now,

what we see both on the side of the company and of the side of the government is that neither one

really has the institutional tools, the legal framework or the experience to know how these lines

should best be drawn. And I expect we're going to see a lot more kind of explosions along these

lines. There's another little element in it, which is that the people who work in these companies

and who do this design would like some say in how their work product is used. You know, I'm just

here, well, I'm not coding anymore because Claude has taken that part of a job away. But I'm doing

whatever is left once all the coding has been outsourced. And I'm pretty sharp and I'm making a lot

of money and nobody else really can do exactly what I do. And I want to be able to say to the

government, you can't make me make something that you then use to destroy my limits. And I get

that. But how much power do unelected employees of tech companies deserve when it comes to national

security? Are they really the ones who should get to say based on whatever, you know, their own

feelings are at any moment, how this technology can be used. So there's a struggle for power within

the companies as well as between the companies and the government. I don't know how y'all gets

worked out. Everything I'm saying is that this is a big problem. It'll be it'll appear in many

different aspects over the next few years. And all you can advise folks on both sides is to try to

behave with a little bit of wisdom and restraint and humility realizing that we don't actually have

all the answers even though we do need to make some decisions. All right, our second story.

The Pentagon is rapidly burning through its stocks of precision weapons less than a week into

the massive campaign of air strikes against Iran while also expending sophisticated air defense

missiles at a rate that puts the US military potentially days away from having to priorities which

targets to intercept according to sources who spoke to the Washington Post. The scope of operation

epic theory is forcing US military commanders to make difficult calculations about how quickly

their Iranian adversaries will burn through their own munitions even as President Trump says the war

may last four to five weeks. Two people familiar with US inventories said that an extended conflict

in the Middle East couldn't require drawing down munitions stocks in the Indo-Pacific region.

A third anonymous US official said that inventories were so thin that a lengthy campaign against

Iran wouldn't leave enough munitions for other threats, especially China. Walter, is this news or

phone news? Well, first of all, it looks to me like that reporter was really fishing for bad news

and kind of pushing his sources to, you know, like, well, it could if it went on long enough, long

enough not being defined. So he's really push, push, push, give me, give me some like news that I can

make a big, do America not have any missiles to talk about a fall apart, all right? And it's possible

that the sources are, you know, don't like what's going on and are trying to help. You know,

this could be something they're kind of working on together. And of course, it could be possible.

These are incredibly public-spirited people who are taking the courageous step of telling the public

news that it should know, but that the administration doesn't want, you know, etc. But let me just,

so we don't actually, you read a new story like this, you do not know. Really, he doesn't say

how long. Like, if you said in two more days, okay, I have a, you know, I have a story. But

if it drags on long enough, it could require, well, are you telling me that in 15 years, it's

possible that we, you know, it's this, it's just a puff, it's just a souffle, you know, just trying

to build something out of the air here. That doesn't take away from the fact that a real consideration

in this war is, you know, to the Iranians run out of missiles before we and our, and our associates

in this war run out of anti-missile stuff. And, and from what I can tell, no, by the nose.

The Iranians have a bunch of missiles, but if, you know, there, there have been stories recently

that the Israelis in the United States and the Americans have been pretty good at finding the,

underground bunkers where they store these missiles and much to the Iranian surprise and

dismayed destroying the missiles. And you're hearing other things too that as, as the Iran's air

defenses have essentially disappeared, our planes can now come in much closer and use cheaper,

infinitely more replaceable missiles in the place of these very sophisticated ones that you need

to deal with the high-end stuff. And then there's the difference between the offensive missiles and

the defensive missiles. This is just very, very mix. So I would say, on the whole, not news.

And I would also say, no responsible American officer or source should ever tell a journalist

like important military information that would be of value to the enemy like this.

Know what? If, if it turns out that we've only got five days of missiles,

I don't want the Iranians to know that. And I don't want anybody telling them that.

And if I were president and one of my military officers was doing that, I would be looking really

hard to figure out who that was and how we can court martial because that, I believe that the

concept is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Now that said, that doesn't mean that the executive

secret should be kept by everybody. You can go to Congress people. There are, there are ways,

if there's something you think is really, really rotten in the Pentagon. And as a real importance,

there are legal ways that you can get that out. But to go like leaking important military

information that could affect the outcome of a war or could endanger lives, you took an oath

son or a daughter, whoever you are. And let me advise you to stick to it.

Just one follow up. You know, you kind of alluded at the beginning to, there are some senior,

relatively senior members of the administration who have been making the case even before the

administration began, the second term began, that, you know, every military resource dedicated

to Europe in the Middle East is a resource that is being taken away from the Indo-Pacific

theater. And that's the only theater that really matters when it comes down to it.

Just regardless of the actual levels of our munitions stockpiles, which, you know, we, of course,

don't know the answer to that. What have you made of that argument that it is that zero sum?

Well, I think it's, it's true about some things and less true about others,

you know, just as a simple matter of, you know, like piles of stuff, you know, some piles are bigger

than others. Some piles actually are really, really useful in the Middle East, but not that useful

in Taiwan. So, you know, blob, it's, it's, it's kind of an apple, not just apples and oranges,

but apples and oranges and figs and grapefruit and kiwi. I mean, it's just a, a big old thing.

And sometimes it's also some, some of these things are sort of bookkeeping, you know,

do you take a bottle of aspirin that's passed the expiration date? Well, maybe you do, maybe you don't.

These things are, they come out in the press like they are very clear cut things and they almost

never are. That said, it does seem like a really good idea to have more of this stuff.

And even more important to have the capability that should you need some really fast,

you have the ability to make it. And also, you know, diplomacy and politics isn't really just about

the number of bullets that you have in your, in your rifle case. You know, if hypothetically,

and I'm not saying this is happening and I'm not taking a position on it, but let's suppose that

your ability to destroy the Iranian navy, let's just say, which, which appears to have happened

to a very large extent, do that very, very quickly is something that in China, they would say,

oh my goodness, they really, this makes it a lot harder to invade Taiwan than we fought.

All right. That might mean that even if it did, even if the missiles used to destroy

the Iranian navy, did cause a little shortage over there in Taiwan, the demonstration effect,

is the Chinese still don't exactly know how many other missiles you have might, I mean, you know,

it's not, not risk-free or anything, but there might be times when it would be worth taking

a bigger lead off base in order to make a point or the gain would be greater than the cost.

So, to try to turn all, everybody wants to turn these things into rules, you know,

this is the way it must be done, and here is the book of procedures and stuff like that.

Life often just doesn't work out that way. All right, final story of the week.

The CIA is working to arm Kurdish forces with the aim of fomenting a popular uprising in

Iran, according to CNN. The Trump administration has been in active discussions with Iranian

opposition groups and Kurdish leaders in Iraq about providing them with military support.

Iranian Kurdish armed groups have thousands of forces operating along the Iraq around

border, primarily in Iraq's Kurdistan region. Several of the groups have released public

statements since the beginning of the war hinting at imminent action and urging Iranian military

forces to defect. The IRGC has been striking Kurdish groups and said on Tuesday that it targeted

Kurdish forces with dozens of drones. According to a senior Kurdistan regional government official,

the CIA support for Iranian Kurdish groups began several months before the current US

Israel air campaign, Walter News or a phone news. Always difficult to tell in that murky world

of intelligence. You know, I have to say at this point, if this Kurds haven't become a little

bit skeptical about American promises of aid, there's something wrong with the Kurds.

You know, fomenting uprising among the Kurds and then abandon them is one of the older plays

in the Middle East playbook. It's been going on for quite a while. So if I were the Kurds,

I would be skeptical and I would want to understand exactly what I was getting and exactly

what it was going to do for me. But let's step back from that and look at the bigger question of

what does this tell us about the situation in Iran and the war situation? And I think and here,

you know, again, I think this does give us a little bit of casts a little bit of light into

the murky darkness of what's actually happening in the war, that it looks as if part of the

administration's hope that it can avoid major ground troop engagements in Iran. And since local

rebels can take the place of American boots on the ground, that I think is a, you know,

it can be a two-edged sword because there are people in Iran, a lot of people in Iran, some of them

Kurdish, by the way, who don't really want Iran to break up into a sort of nest of hostile

micro-states at the end of the war. You know, the Azeri part go off, the Balak part go off, the Arab

part, some of the other tribes further in the east, the Kurds, etc, etc, etc. You know,

do you really want your country to turn into Yugoslavia with another, you know, long rounds of

civil wars and God knows what? And there are a lot of people that don't want to see that. And it

also has the potential for unifying, well, it has potentially unify people who don't like the

current Iranian government, but who also think that even a bad government is better than a generation

of civil war. And there are a lot of people who think that way, in a lot of places. So this is a,

it's a dangerous thing to play with, arguably the experience of Iraqi Kurdistan, which has been

relatively happy both for the Kurds and the Iraqi seem to be managing it. Maybe this gives you a

little bit more, you know, of a framework to think about, you know, so there's an Iranian Kurdistan

that is in a federal position with the new republic or kingdom or whatever it's going to be

of Iran that we're doing this at all would suggest that there is a sense that the task before the

United States in dealing with Iran is a really significant one. It's not one of just dropping a few

bombs on Tehran and then everybody breaks into, you know, Hattikfa and Yankee doodle and joy reigns.

So we'll see, but I would say this, it's news. It shows us, it's a window into a very interesting room.

All right, that is it for the news this week. Let's have the big conversation.

So just to lay some of the groundwork here, Walter, some of the big picture of what's happened

since Saturday. So the US and Israel have launched the coordinated air campaign against Iran,

targeting key officials, including the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Kamani.

Around 2000 strikes had been conducted between February 28th and March 1st alone and have taken out

lots of other key Iranian officials, military commanders and facilities. Iran so far has retaliated

by launching dozens of drones and ballistic missiles throughout the Persian Gulf at targets in

Israel and US military bases in Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE. You know,

I think over 1,000 people have been killed so far in Iran. There was something like last time I

checked a dozen in Israel, six at least US service members have been killed, less than a dozen in the

Gulf states. Trump's claiming the conflict could last a month. The Democrats in Congress are

questioning the legal basis for the campaign. So there's a lot more here than we can bite off in

one episode, but I guess let's start with this. So the operation has, by all or most measures,

been a pretty stunning operational military success so far. At the political level though, it seems

like almost all bets are off. We just, you know, you just mentioned the potential for a kind of

Yugoslavia type break up. That's one potential consequence, you know, people talk about hoping for

a Venezuela type scenario. There's the return of the Palevi monarchy. There's an Afghanistan type

forever war. It's, it's all a really difficult thing for all of us and our listeners to wrap our

minds around with the potential scenarios ranging from so promising and hopeful to so horrifying

and threatening. So please just walk us through how you're thinking about this as of today.

Okay. Well, you're talking about all those different scenarios. Did remind me of the old during

the Vietnam War, the, we had the domino theory that if, you know, South Vietnam fell then the

next one, like Domino's, the other countries would fall, which, you know, happened for Cambodian

Laos. But anyway, I remember the, the forerunner of Saturday Night Live, which was a, the time

was a magazine ran a story saying that the problem was that we were using the wrong model. It wasn't

Domino's. Maybe we should try the idea of jacks and that China was trying to do a forzy in

Indochina by picking up all. In that case, maybe the answer would be to have Taiwan distracted by

attacking. So on and so on. So you could come up with different games, each of which would give you

a different model and a different strategy. It just reminds us all how hard it is to wrap our heads

around war. You know, war in some ways is the supreme activity of the human race. That is,

we, we tend to fight war the way we ought to worship God. That is with all our hearts,

soul, mind, and strength. It calls out everything that a society has to put into it.

And because of that, it is extremely difficult to understand. It is extremely difficult to plan for.

It is extremely difficult to do it well. And so with this war, you know, with all of these kinds of

swirling possibilities and so on, as I, as I try to make sense of it and try to figure out,

okay, what are the, what are the axes on which this thing is likely to turn? It looks to me like,

it was pretty clear what Trump wants, which is that he wants to be, he wants the regime to change

without American forces having to take, you know, be there on the ground. Or at most, maybe a sort of,

you know, occupy the oil refineries or something of that kind. And note, by the way, so far, we have

not attacked Iran's oil infrastructure, which is interesting given all given the sheer volume of

attacks that have been going on. And the Iranians don't want him to succeed in that. You know,

this is, this is where we are. And the Iranian, if we think about how do the Iranians think they can

withstand a combined U.S. Israeli attack, you know, they, they know already they, they knew before

the war that didn't have any air defenses to speak of that the U.S. is going to be able to do a lot

of devastation. They even knew that the Israelis had penetrated them, you know, the, the Israelis knew

how many pairs of underwear the Iatola had left them as drawer, you know, that, I mean, that's,

you know, that level of penetration. You know, so why knowing all of this, did they think, okay,

no, we, we actually can still win this thing. And I think they, they, they, they came up with sort

of two concepts of how Iran wins. One is that by counterattacks and missile attacks and so on

in the Gulf, as well as to Israel and to American interests, they could wreak such havoc on world

energy markets and world financial markets and cause such distress in the neighborhood that

everybody, including Wall Street, would be screaming at Trump, stop this nonsense. And they'll

have noted that when something sort of similar happened over Greenland and, you know, Trump backed

off of his demands on Greenland when the stock market crashed and everybody said it was bad and

the Republicans in Congress were saying it was bad, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So they

had this retaliatory strategy. They don't think they can destroy Israel or inflict damage comparable

to what they're taking, but they think that they can make enough trouble. They can stop oil going

in and out of the streets of Hormuz. Okay, so that's one problem, one side of their approach.

And I would say at this point, the jury is still somewhat out. This is where, you know, we

were talking earlier about do we have enough interceptors to take out their missiles before they

run out? That's part of the problem, you know, if we run out of missile defense before they run

out of missiles, their ability to wreak havoc to Gulf oil and gas production is really pretty

significant. But even in the current state where we have those defenses, the straits of Hormuz

are essentially closed. There's just not a lot of traffic going in and out of there.

And Qatar has shut down a lot of its production and some other places are doing it. And there's

also a bit of a hostage thing here. If the Iranians were to attack the water desalination plants or

the power plants that feed them, you would create the most massive imaginable humanitarian crisis

in a lot of these heavily populated cities that sit in the middle of a desert.

The Americans haven't taken out the Iranian oil infrastructure. And the Iranians haven't

taken out the water infrastructure of the Gulf states. You know, interesting. You know,

a class of its does talk about how war doesn't get total war right away. So right now,

the Iranians seem to be getting a chance to get that first strategy to work. Now,

it has been coming on slowly because up until today, yeah, there were some stock market

slipperyness and the oil prices up to last I looked. It was about $80 a barrel. I don't know what

it is now. Today, it looked like things were getting a little tougher. I think the Dow was down

like a thousand points, much more of a sea of red on some of these trading things. And obviously,

the longer an oil shortage continues, the more serious the economic consequences and therefore

the political consequences of the war are. On the other hand, these Iranian attacks have actually

united a lot of countries against Iran, even Qatar of all places has been bombing Iran. I never

thought that you'd see the Emir of Qatar, you know, joining this, the shade of John McCain

to sing bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. But we have lived to see that day, Jeremy, you and I.

We don't know how that's going to work out. And I'm sure that both on the Iranian side and on

the American side, people are trying to figure out how to game this and make some progress. It was

a little discouraging late today to see that after Iranian missile launches had dropped pretty

dramatically. There was actually a burst of higher activity today. Now does that mean that

you know, they're putting everything they've got into one last frantic push? Or does it mean

that they've kind of like figured out how to deal under the circumstances in our, you know,

and that this is sustainable as of right now, we do not know. So that was one of their strategy.

The other, which is their whole card, it's the one they really don't want to have to play.

But if they do, we'll see. It's their most formidable. And that's that it's not that Trump always

chickens out. But when it comes to ground wars, America always chickens out that, you know,

we left Afghanistan. Iran knows better than anybody else how much our departure from Iraq has

enabled Iran to become a lead actor in Iraq. So they know and they can look at the polls

they see. The president is not very popular. They can see the war is not very popular. And that

the longer people think the war will last the less they like it. Ground troops are unpopular.

High gas prices are unpopular. So that I think the Iranians in a way like the North Vietnamese,

so many years ago, understand that while the American army is in principle the strongest fighting

force in the world, the question is, do the Americans really, you know, have the will or the ability

to use it as much and for as long as they would need to? So all they have to do there is to just

keep saying no and not talking. And at every stage, Trump has to either accept a political defeat,

okay, well, all right, fine, we've destroyed a lot of stuff. And now we're going home and everything

is fine. He tries to spend that as a win or does does he face, you know, but the Iranians, meanwhile,

aren't giving an inch rhetorically, we're going to keep building missiles. You know, you have not

taken away our right for enrichment. We are still proud and strong. So they'll be giving a lot of

like nasty ugly rhetoric to rub his nose and our noses in the failure to make the political

changes that we hope to make and calling it a victory and celebrating and so on and so forth.

And that will force in their minds Trump to either go in deeper, which will probably they think

and hope destroy him politically and make the United States and all future presidents so allergic

to interventions in the Middle East that will never be back. So from their point of view,

they still have a lot of cards in their hand. And I don't see them moving toward

kind of a surrender process yet. That doesn't mean there might not be somebody inside the IRGC

who is very high up and would really much rather be rich than be holy. There are people like that,

even in Iran, you know, follow Delcy down the pathway to glory and maybe has enough friends

and allies to pull it off. We don't, you know, again, we do not know. But I think they're still

on the Iranian side. They have reasons to think that if they hold out, they can win.

But on the American side, you know, you, as you say, you look at the operational success,

you look at the widening of the American coalition. And so far, I don't think President

Trump sees any reason why he should like come home with his tail between his likes.

When both sides still think they can win, it's rare for wars to come to an end.

One final question. We've talked a lot on this podcast over the years about how, you know,

maybe a better way to understand the things that Trump says and does is less through the lens of

like policy or strategy as we normally understand those. And more through on the one hand spectacle

and ensuring that Trump is just unlike any other human being on earth in world politics.

And on the other through his own domestic coalition management of MAGA, right before we hop

down here, you know, he pretty explicitly called out Tucker and Megan Kelly and said, you know,

they are not MAGA. I am MAGA. So how do you see the war so far? And it's, you know, it's been less

than a week. He also fired the dog lady. That's right. So how do you see

it so far through those two lenses? Well, you could argue that sort of like the equivalent

of the night of the long knives and you turn on the radicals. I do think that, you know,

certainly right now Trump is reminding, you know, every there's nobody on the planet in business

or politics or anything else who doesn't understand that Donald Trump's decisions are driving their day.

And that if he can be persuaded to end the war, well, things will go one way. If he continues,

things will go another way. So, and then the suspense will he win? Will he lose? What will happen?

We are, we are right. In that sense, we're in the sweet spot. The only problem is that he really could

lose. This really is a big gamble. He has bet the farm on this one thing. I mean, this,

there's always the possibility that you can find some sort of a way to spin out. But, you know,

the more dramatic the thing is actually the harder it is to exit without something that looks like

a win. There's definitely that. And then in terms of the coalition management, I think it is

interesting that he, I believe he's thought all along that the kind of anti-Israel to anti-Semitic

kind of, you know, element of the MAGA coalition was once you get offline, not all that numerous.

And this kind of heart and soul of the MAGA movement on the whole wants America to win.

I think America's enemies are bad and likes America's allies, particularly Israel, which is,

you know, I think getting in for a lot of MAGA folks is our best ally. And likes and also

admires and respects the display of power and courage. So right now, you've got, you know,

sort of Carlson and these other folks have kind of a short end of the stick and public opinion.

And they're kind of winally having to argue, well, America really deserves to lose. America will

lose. And, you know, to get that, once you're in that box, unless America really does start to lose,

you're in bad shape. You do not come out well. And so I think, yes, Trump is definitely,

has decided that he needed to, you know, he's tolerated these people. He's not been kind of

given him a hard time, given him some space, but they kept, they sort of kept radicalizing.

And they kept, they became increasingly anti-Trump as opposed to ultra-Trump. There's a big

difference between ultra-Trumpy and anti-Trump. So ultra-Trumpy that you think Trump is a traitor

to the true vision. And he thinks that that's where some of these people have gone. And so he's

adding to his collection of heads. All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on

the tip of the week.

Walter, you touched on it before, but, you know, it's a truism we've all heard for most of our

lives that air power alone cannot win wars. And I guess also the, you know, covert operation,

operations and targeted assassinations and what people refer to as mowing the grass also cannot

by themselves win wars. So your tip of the week is to tell us, are these truisms true throughout

history? Changing the political outcome, so I guess. What do you mean by winning a war?

And I seriously, you know, I would say, well, I guess I would argue that, you know, to some

degree, you say that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are kind of an example of winning a war with air power

and causing a political change in Japan. It's never say never, you know, one of the

purses of the modern American policy world is the degree to which so many people, you know,

start thinking that theorems and maxims are so, you know, you just rely on them to predict things.

They're not aids to help you analyze situations. They're like rules. And if you follow them,

you'll get a good grade on the test. And then you'll get into like an even better job. And

and so that kind of goody two shoes nerdy with George Bundy-esque approach to politics.

And it so, so I would not, it depends on, you know, can air power win a war? It depends on

what your goals are, what your definition of victory is, who you're fighting, how much air power

are you prepared to use, et cetera. But I do think in this case, it's going to be very, very hard

to bomb the Ayatollas into accepting the end of the Islamic Republic.

All right, there you have it. Thanks to our producers, Josh Cross and Quinn Waller. Thanks to Alex

Fatana, but Hudson and my co-host Walter Russell Mead. I'm Jeremy Stern. We'll see you next week.

And until then, please go rate and review us. This helps other people find the show.